changing meanings of work in germany, korea, and the united states in historical perspectives_2009

8/17/2019 Changing Meanings of Work in Germany, Korea, And the United States in Historical Perspectives_2009

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Changing Meanings of Work inGermany, Korea, and the United

States in Historical Perspectives

K. Peter Kuchinke

The problem and the solution. The article uses three broad his-

torical eras, preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial, to investigate

similarities and differences in the meaning of working in three coun-

tries: Germany, South Korea, and the United States of America. Basedon the proposition of meaning as created in an interplay between the

individual and the social environment, attention is paid to work as a

social institution, and the characteristics of work processes, technolo-

gies, and organizations are described. The conclusion identifies com-

mon and divergent themes and argues for the importance of historical

perspectives for the education and training of human resource devel-

opment practitioners and the utility of a historical and comparative

approach to understanding the meaning of working. Directions for

further research are offered at the conclusion of the article.

Keywords: historical analysis; meaning of working; Korea; Germany;United States of America

Although historical perspectives are rare in the literature of human resource

development (HRD) and related fields, an examination of changing meanings of

work over time holds interest from a scholarly point of view and can inform

work meaning in contemporary settings. In addition, understanding the evolu-tion of work meaning is useful for a host of practical applications in national and

international contexts, such as career counseling and planning, job design, and

workplace redesign and organization development more broadly. This article

will develop selected themes of the evolution of the work meaning in three

modern economies and highlight their similarities and differences. Given the

constraints of the article and the breadth of the topic, the coverage will, by

necessity, be eclectic rather than comprehensive. Numerous accounts could be

given and many different perspectives adopted related to work meaning in a

specific period, country, and social group, and these detailed accounts wouldhighlight the complexities and difficulties of narrating history from an outsider’s

Advances in Developing Human Resources Vol. 11, No. 2 April 2009 168-188

DOI: 10.1177/1523422309332780

Copyright 2009 SAGE Publications

This article was subjected to a two-tier blind review process that did not involve the author who

is currently member of the editorial board.


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Kuchinke / CHANGING MEANINGS OF WORK 169

perspective, in hindsight, and based on secondhand and thirdhand accounts.

Although all social science scholarship, including historical writing, is in itself

context bound and reflective of specific historical interests and traditions

(Mannheim, 1986), the author’s hope is that the article succeeds in highlightingbroad historical trends that inform theory and practice and whet the appetite for

more in-depth study and follow-up research, without succumbing to the risks of

an overly simplistic, biased, or stereotypical treatment of the topic at hand.

The three countries were selected because of their differential social, cul-

tural, economic, and political histories that allow contrasts between a highly

free market–based economy in the United States, a social market economic

model in Germany, and a comparatively recently industrialized country, South

Korea (Korea), that is rapidly transforming itself into a knowledge economy

and a global economic force. Without claiming geographic generalizability,the United States, Germany, and South Korea (Korea) do belong to distinct

cultural groupings (Galtung, 1981), offer distinct work-related value prefer-

ences (Hofstede, 2001), and exhibit distinct country-level normative, cogni-

tive, and regulatory institutional profiles (Kostova, 1997), which can illuminate

similarities and differences in the meaning of working for an assumed but

likely theoretical modal segment of the population in the three countries.

Underlying the rationale of this article are two orientations to writing about

the topic: the complex and intricate relationship between the individual and the

social, and the nature of meaning. Related to the first, it should be observedthat in the extant literature, the meaning of working has been construed primar-

ily as an individual level construct concerned with “comprehensive, trans-situ-

ational and relatively enduring orientations towards work in general in terms

of a person’s evaluative system and cognition” (Ruiz Quintanilla & Wilpert,

1988, p. 4). It is, however, the broader environment that provides the norma-

tive, cognitive, and regulatory contexts for subjective valuations. Thus, from a

sociological perspective, work should be viewed as a social institution subject

to societal norms, expectations, options, and arrangements (Sweet & Meiksins,

2008). Although neither the personal nor the social realm should be seen assuperordinate—see, for example, the interesting proposition by Giddens

(1984) of the potential for personal action to change social norms—discussing

the psychological without the sociological aspects of meaning of working

appears to be incomplete.

The second point relates to the question of whether the meaning of working

should be viewed as fixed and stable, as is assumed by Ruiz Quintanilla and

Wilpert’s (1988) definition above and also by a large number of studies in

vocational psychology (e.g., Holland, 1985) and career studies (e.g., the work

by Schein, 1993, on career anchors), or whether the more salient aspects ofmeaning are constructed in context, malleable in response to situational fac-

tors, and thus temporary (see the related discussion on constitutive approaches

to leadership in Grint, 2000). In line with a constructivist approach, the thesis


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Advances in Developing Human Resources April 2009170

here is that the topic is best framed as an active process of meaning making

with the “result” of this process as neither personally nor contextually fixed or

permanent. Rather, the process of making meaning of working is part of the

self-reflexive and self-constitutive project that characterizes personhood or“self” in posttraditional and postmodern contexts (Bauman, 1991; Giddens,

1991). As of the date of the writing of this article, far-reaching upheavals in

the economy of the three countries and the world as a whole are under way

that affect the meaning of working and provide material for a new round of

accounts on the topic of work meaning to be written in the future.

Work meaning, thus, is constructed and expressed at the individual level but

is also reflective of specific moments in time that provide points of reference

and orientations with respect to how work activities are experienced and what

meanings are assigned. Four brief examples at different levels of analysis canserve to illustrate these points. Research about occupational identity of indi-

viduals engaged in socially tainted work tasks, such as jobs in sanitation and

slaughter houses, suggests that individuals construct and maintain a positive

self-image through work group–level cognitive framing and reinterpretation of

work activities considered by the larger society to be unsavory and distasteful

(Ashford & Kreiner, 1999). A second example, taken from country-level

research, suggests that in Scandinavian countries, where higher levels of pro-

fessional qualification are required and higher wages are paid to early child-

hood teachers and senior care center nursing support staff, professionalself-esteem and self-expressed career satisfaction are higher than in the United

States where these jobs require lower levels of professional training and are at

the bottom of the pay scale (Sweet & Meiksins, 2008). A third example, intro-

ducing a historical perspective, suggests that surgeons in medical practice,

now regarded highly as belonging to the most prestigious occupational groups,

were, prior to the advent of modern techniques of sterilization of equipment

and infection control, considered to be little more than butchers whose patients

were as likely to die because of the effects of the treatment as to heal (Abbott,

1988). Finally, introducing a life span and career development perspective, itcan be assumed that the same low-skill, part-time job that provides the first job

experience and pocket money for a teenager may be viewed and valued very

differently by that same individual who has gotten laid off as a midcareer

professional forced to make ends meet and differently still by that same person

after recent retirement with a secure pension, seeking social interaction and a

way to while the day away.

These examples are offered in support of the theses that (a) the meaning of

working is subject to social influences within a reference group; (b) within-

and between-country differences exist with respect to very similar occupa-tional tasks based on the regulatory environment (in this example, of the level

of education and compensation of teachers and nursing staff); and (c) the

valuation of a given set of occupational tasks can vary dramatically over time,


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viewed both historically and within the life and career span of individuals. The

meaning of working, therefore, should be considered not as an individual trait

that is fixed and an essential part of an individual’s personality but as a socially

constructed phenomenon subject to a variety of influences within and outsidethe individual and to situational and historical influences, and as a phenome-

non that is actively created, modified, challenged, and negotiated as part of the

ongoing achievement of identity creation and self-representation.

The plan for the remainder of the article then is to examine similarities and

differences in the construction of meaning of working by taking into account

the dynamic interaction between the personal and the social. This will be done

by approximating three eras in technological and socioeconomic development:

preindustrial, industrial, and contemporary. Although definitions and boundar-

ies would require much additional justification beyond the scope of this article,these eras indicate transition points where the institution of work for a major-

ity has been observed to have shifted in qualitatively significant ways. The

three eras, however, do not coincide in a temporal sense. In the United States,

a commonly used transition point to the industrial age is the end of the 19th

century, when after the ravages of the Civil War, mass production and modern

factories began to draw large numbers of workers from rural America to the

cities, and even larger numbers of immigrants were absorbed in the manufac-

turing establishments, giving rise to scientific management, labor unions, and

the beginning of a mass consumer culture. The shift from a rural, independent,and largely subsistence-based agricultural to an urban and factory-based

employment pattern brought dramatic shifts in work as a social institution and

work as an individual experience (Chandler, 1993).

During the early decades of the 1800s, industrial development in the numer-

ous small and large principalities, feudal states, and imperial free cities on the

territory now comprising the unified Germany was influenced by the introduc-

tion of the steam engine developed in England in the latter part of the 1700s,

which enabled the development of transportation, coal mining, and a host of

other industries, and supplanted industrial labor for agricultural, handicraft,skilled crafts, and manual labor. After the foundation of the German Reich

under Bismarck in 1871, government policy led to the expansion of industrial

production in heavy industry, trade, banking, and manufacturing and, thus,

transforming work in an emerging industrial nation (Wever, 2001).

Korea, in contrast, remained a largely agricultural society until late in the

20th century. The Choson dynasty, having reigned since 1392 over a little-

commercialized peasant economy, ended in 1910 to be replaced by Japanese

occupation and, following World War II, the U.S. military in the context of the

Korean war between 1950 and 1953. Only during the 1960s did South Koreaalong with the other “Asian tigers”—namely, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and

Singapore—begin to modernize and develop very rapidly from a rural to an

industrial economy (Amsden, 1989).


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The inflection point from the industrial to a knowledge-based and global

economy and orientation in the three countries under investigation in this

article is somewhat easier to determine and also more uniform, and it will be

set, approximately, in the early 1980s. After an era of predominance of U.S.manufacturing and rebuilding of the war-torn economies in much of the rest of

the world, the decline of manufacturing, compared with the service sectors

in all three countries; advanced information technologies; ease of trade restric-

tions; increased flow of capital and goods; and mobility of labor were among

the factors ushering in the shift toward a postindustrial, global, and

knowledge-based economy that once again transformed the way work is con-

ceptualized, experienced, and structured in substantial ways in the United

States, Germany, and perhaps with a delay caused by the Asian financial crisis

in 1997, in Korea.

Preindustrial Work

Work in preindustrial times should be imagined as radically different from

contemporary understandings, in part because of the dramatic differences in

technology, settings, and structure of the work process and work organization

but also because of the social conditions in the early democratic (United

States) and feudal (Korea and Germany) societies. Prior to the widespread

mechanization of labor in the form of the modern cotton gin invented by ElieWhitney in the United States in 1793 and the various uses of the steam engine

in agriculture, transportation, milling, and other areas, work has been described

as almost entirely manual, local, and subsistence focused. There was minimal

division of labor in the modern sense; work processes were performed in a

holistic manner, and products were nonstandard and produced on demand

(Volti, 2008). Education for work was by apprenticeship in the German guilds

for the small number of skilled crafts, but for the large majority in Europe,

colonial America, and Korea, work skills were handed down from one genera-

tion to the next and through on-the-job training. In largely agrarian and craft-based societies, there were far fewer occupations and professional groupings,

and work processes tended to be simpler. For most, the boundary between

work and nonwork was fluid or nonexistent because individuals’ living quar-

ters were on the small farms, above the workshops, or close to the stores that

provided their livelihood. Just as the notions of leisure time, vacation, or old-

age pension were nonexistent in preindustrial societies, so was the idea of

childhood as a time protected from the demands of physical labor. Child labor,

year-around work, long work days following the seasons, and lifelong work,

along with a lack of protection against illness, injury, or exploitation have beendescribed as the norm (Ciulla, 2000) and gave rise to the Marxian analysis and

critique of wage labor under capitalism in England in the mid-1800s (Marx,

1992). In Germany and the United States, public education in any systematic


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sense of the term was not introduced until the early 1900s, and university train-

ing as professional preparation was restricted to law, medicine, and religion

until the Humboldtian university reform in Prussia in the mid-1800s and the

advent of the public university system in the United States following the pas-sage of the Land Grant College Act introduced by Senator Justin Smith Morrill

of Vermont in 1862 (Clark, 1986).

Preindustrial work should further be imagined in the context of highly rigid

social structures. Social stratification meant the virtual absence of occupational

mobility and occupational choice, and a person’s social background indicated

almost complete control over the type of work, standards of living, income, and

social status. Professional and occupational roles for women were severely

restricted, and after the introduction of public school and health care systems

in the 1800s, teaching and nursing were virtually the only work roles outsidethe home open to women. Strong religious institutions and beliefs constitute

another facet of preindustrial societies and the meaning of working.

Korea

In Korea, the influence of Buddhism and Confucianism provided a strong

normative framework for working. Buddhism was observed from the 2nd to

the14th centuries as a national religion, according to which physical labor was

a path to Nirvana (freedom from suffering). The belief was that when one car-ried out arduous work and suffered from it, one could be free from greedy

passions. Accordingly, working meant an activity that harmonizes the human

spirit with nature as well as an activity that develops personal character (Jang,

1999). From the end of the 14th century, when Confucianism arose and pre-

dominated as the main Korean philosophy and religion, the meaning of work-

ing changed. Confucianism emphasized disciplining oneself mentally and

harmonizing one’s thoughts with one’s behavior, and scholars who studied

sacred books were given preferential treatment as the ruling class in the strict

hierarchical society. Merchants, craftsmen, and the peasantry who lived ontheir labor or skills were treated as commoners or menials, and their work was

looked down on (Kim & Lee, 1978).

Germany

In Germany, the Christian tradition and religious teachings in the various

and varied denominations arising after the Protestant Reformation of 1517

exercised their impact on the understanding of work and meaning of working.

As Placher (2005) chronicles in insightful ways, the notion of vocation and

calling in the Christian sense underwent dramatic changes from vocation as

conversion to Christianity in the second century, to joining the clergy in the

Middle Ages, to secular efforts in the service of God and hope for redemption


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and salvation in the centuries after the Reformation and, in particular, in the

Calvinist tradition. The notion of work as duty in the religious sense was trans-

ferred to duty to the landlord or sovereign in the feudal system and, later, the

German state. In this sense, work was seen as absolving one’s obligationtoward the patron who, in return, was responsible for ensuring the well-being

of his (and very rarely her) subjects. In particular, in the newly formed German

Reich of 1871, the emerging and growing middle class of public servants, civil

administrators, and military officers adopted the notion of work as obligation

toward the State, and this influence has persisted in Germany to the current

day (Wever, 2001).

The United States

Work in colonial America likely carried many of the characteristics of feu-

dal continental Europe along with the institution of slavery and the system of

indentured servitude for those immigrants unable to repay the passage to the

new world after arrival. In the newly formed republic of 1776, and with the

first waves of immigrants and settling of the territories West of the Appalachians

in the early 1800s, however, two strong movements converged that shaped the

meaning of working in the early decades in the United States and continue to

characterize what might be called “work in America.” The first is the founding

of the country as a democracy without an aristocracy and, compared withEurope, a far smaller influence of a landed gentry and, thus, plenty of oppor-

tunity and the need for an active life in the former colonies and the new terri-

tories. With amazement and admiration, for example, an early observer of the

political and civic system of the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in

1835 that the

whole population are [sic] engaged in productive industry, and . . . the poorest as well as themost opulent members of the commonwealth are ready to combine their efforts. . . . TheAmericans arrived but as yesterday on the territory . . . and they have already changed the

whole order of nature for their own advantage. (p. 215)

The opportunity and necessity for work and advancement were ideologi-

cally grounded in the Protestant belief in the sanctity of labor as a secular

calling and means of serving God. As Martin Luther said, the demands of a

Christian life included a unified pattern of work and worship in whatever sta-

tion or profession a person found himself or herself. John Calvin, in the 16th

century, “extended, systematized, and institutionalized” Luther’s ideas by

preaching that “work was the will of God and even ceaseless ‘dumb toil’ suf-

ficed to please him [sic]” (Gini, 2001, p. 21). The tenets of what Max Webercalled the Protestant work ethic were based on the moral obligation of a life of

hard work, self-discipline, asceticism, and concern for achievement (Weber,


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1985), and combined necessity and virtue into a core belief of work in the

United States. Best-selling books in the early 1800s describing the lives of

“self-made” men, such as Andrew Carnegie and P. T. Barnum, and “rags-to-

riches” stories, such as the popular Ragged Dick novels by Horatio Alger, aswell as the moral worth of material success popularized the tenets of the work

ethic and the ideal of the endless possibilities open to everyone who just tried

hard enough, despite the fact that for the majority of immigrants, the dreams

of success and comfort were clearly out of reach (Wilms, 1979). The iconic

image of the person from humble origins overcoming hardship through dili-

gence, hard work, courage, ambition, and tough-minded pragmatism appears

to be firmly grounded in U.S. mythology and culture that endures to the pres-

ent day, seemingly reinforced, again, during the recent U.S. presidential elec-

tions of 2008. In this context, then, work is seen as an opportunity to proveone’s personal worth, resolve, and moral character—notwithstanding the fact

that opportunities for advancement and success are, in fact, far from evenly

distributed and that underprivileged social groups, such as immigrants from

certain parts of the world, African Americans, and women, enjoy the opportu-

nities to rise in their careers in significantly smaller numbers.

Work and Industrialization

The era of industrialization and modernization of work organizations, worktechnologies, and work processes ushered in qualitative shifts in the institution

of work and the subjective experience of working. Removing the confines of

life in small communities with their stable membership, strong religious tradi-

tions, and strict family and local hierarchies, work for hire in the rapidly

industrializing settings, factories, and early corporations of the late 19th cen-

tury added dimensions of choice and opportunity for self-direction but also

drastically increased physical and emotional demands that were likely unknown

in the earlier era.

The United States

In the United States, the history of management and organization provides

the framework for the changing understanding of work. As, for example,

Ciulla (2001) narrated, the rise of the factory system in the United States

around the turn of the 20th century meant that work was now under the control

of the clock that determined the speed of work on the production line, the

length of the work day and week, and the rate of pay under the piece-rate

system. The alienation of mechanized and employment-based work underscientific management, of the person as a “cog in the wheel of production” as

graphically shown in Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times, and the—by

today’s standards—appallingly unsafe working conditions in the early factories


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gave rise to the labor unions, whose membership peaked around 1920 at more

than 5 million workers but died back during the 1920s because of union-

busting and other antiunion tactics by employers, poor union leadership, and

new benefits given to workers (Ciulla, 2000). The human relations movement,focusing on the individual’s work attitudes and feelings of workers and their

effects on productivity, emerged from a series of experiments at the Western

Electric plant in Hawthorne, Illinois, during the mid-1920s. Contrasted to

F. W. Taylor’s engineering approach to supervision and work design, the

Hawthorne experiments and ensuing value orientation of humanistic psychol-

ogy focused on the agency, worth, and dignity of the individual, whose opin-

ion, feelings, and subjective experience were seen as paramount to achieving

not only organizational goals but also a sense of personal identity as a worker

and productive citizen. The notion of work as an expression of self, the pos-sibility of work as a means of realizing one’s higher aspirations, and the avail-

ability of alternative choices of work should be seen as key aspects of the U.S.

idea of work that developed during the middle part of the 20th century and has

become an enduring part of the meaning of working. This shift can be under-

stood by the material well-being of the United States during the decades fol-

lowing World War II, from which this country emerged as the only

industrialized nation whose infrastructure and industry escaped the ravages of

the War. This circumstance along with the expansion of the higher education

system and the availability of educational loans to servicemen and service-women to enroll in the nations’ colleges and universities raised the expectation

for participation, satisfaction, and nonmaterial outcomes from work.

At the same time, however, U.S. large corporations with their strict hierar-

chies, large bureaucracies, and anonymous work settings, proved unable to

provide the setting for meaningful work, setting up the struggle for freedom

and control depicted vividly in Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray

Flannel Suit (Ciulla, 2000), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and

Hochschild’s The Managed Heart (1983). The romantic vision of work as a

place of pride, belonging, satisfaction, and commitment, then, is contrastedwith the notion of work as toil and trouble (the title of Joe Kincheloe’s, 1995,

book on the integration of academic and vocational education) and, ultimately,

the disappointment of employment settings and contemporary organizations

unable to fulfill the hope of humanistic psychology’s dream of an integration

or harmonization of the self and the (workplace-related) social. This tension,

in a way caused by the highly increased expectations of the experience of

work, appears as a significant characteristic of the meaning of working in the

industrialized United States and is well expressed by the late Studs Terkel,

whose best-selling book Working starts out as follows:

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as tothe body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights,


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about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all),about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking woundedamong the great many of us. (Terkel, 1974, p. xiii, parentheses in the original)

Germany

Whereas the notions of meaningful work and self-realization through work,

or at least in part through work, traveled easily from the United States to

Europe and later to Asia, the German context of work and organization differs

markedly from the North American free-market model. Many important and

interesting details related to work and its meaning in Germany mark the first

half of the 20th century; a more extended analysis would include the rapid

change and transformation during the final years of the first Reich under the

reign of Kaiser Wilhelm and the intensification of manufacturing in the years

leading up to World War I. This era was followed by the dismantling of the

German industrial infrastructure following its defeat in 1918; it included the

influence of the Russian revolution of 1917 and strong leanings by the work-

ing class toward a socialist and communist political model as well as explosive

cultural growth and diversity during democratization during the Weimar

Republic in the 1920s up to the Great Depression. It would further include the

political events of 1933, with the election to power of the National Socialist

Party and Hitler’s assumption as absolute political and military leader, who

initiated a public works program focused on the rearmament of the German

military and the weapons industry in the mid-1930s, leading up to the start of

World War II in 1939. Working, during these diverse times, was characterized

by a strong sense of duty to fulfill one’s obligation to the State and its

representatives—first, the Kaiser and the empireal bureaucracy and, later, the

national-socialist totalitarian regime where obedience, belief in the authority

and rightfulness of superiors, and unquestioned loyalty were seen as key attri-

butes of working that were demanded and given.

After the surrender in 1945, the Allied occupation forces allowed and

encouraged worker unions and employer groups to be reestablished in the ter-

ritory that later became the Federal Republic of Germany.

A far-ranging social dialogue developed over what shape the society’s new social, economic,and political institutions, including collective bargaining, should take. A broad consensusemerged . . . that the only way the market economy could function safely would be if the powerof the enterprises were tempered by free collective bargaining and worker participation orcodetermination . . . in management. (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991, p. 16)

Codetermination resulted in a typically European form of industrial democ-

racy, soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market economy), and a comprehensive

social safety net that stood in stark contrast to the unrestricted (at least until

recently) and highly competitive market economy of the United States. For


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much of the post-War period and well into the 1990s, German workers enjoyed

a comparatively high standard of living, comprehensive social insurance, and

long-term job security anchored in the German constitution, including the

Works Council—the union representation at the executive level that was con-stitutionally mandated and legally established in each firm with more than five

employees. With the chaotic experience of the Weimar Republic and the regime

of the Third Reich in recent memory, Germany deliberately embarked on a path

of work governance that assigned clear and formal rights and duties to each

member of society. Such rule-bound behavior, anchored in law and enforced in

many formal and informal ways, formed the foundation for transactional styles

of work relationships, where desired behaviors are elicited through a process of

exchange, and specific rewards and recognition are given for specific behav-

iors. Not surprisingly, this mode of exchange was maintained through a strongpresence of labor unions whose membership as a percentage of the total labor

force has hovered around the 40% mark for several decades (U.S. Department

of Labor, 2001) and has recently expanded through the establishment of a con-

federation of organized labor in diverse service sectors. This is in contrast with

the steady decline in union membership in the United States since the 1960s,

where fewer than 8% of all private sector workers worked with union represen-

tation in 2006 (Sweet & Meiksins, 2007).

A final characteristic of working in Germany was the highly rigid labor

market that ensured, on one hand, longevity on the job for a large majority ofemployees and high levels of expertise through long apprenticeships and in-

company training but, on the other hand, offered strong structural barriers to

career changes, earning additional university degrees past the age of 30, or

working outside of one’s field of occupational preparation. This system led to

high levels of long-term structural unemployment among all segments of the

populations, including those with university degrees. Working in Germany,

then, for most of the past 50 years, has meant absolving one’s duties within the

context of a clearly articulated and rigid occupational system that offered

secure employment situations, advancement, and comfortable standards ofliving but also discouraged lateral movement, obligated employers, and failed

to facilitate strategic reorientation. The system assigned specific roles and

responsibilities, and offered, to those in the workforce and to the unemployed,

clearly defined and generous benefits.

Whereas work and identity are closely linked in the U.S. normative

context—consider the ubiquitous first question to a stranger “And what do you

do (for a living)?”—working in Germany, as a rule, is not nearly as central to

the individual sense of self. Although pride in workmanship and professional

competence are valued highly, there is a far greater sense of separationbetween work and nonwork pursuits, both of which carry equal weight. As

much as career success and material well-being are valued and their loss

feared, according to the authors of a recent large-scale study on the meaning


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of working (Miegel & Peterson, 2008), it does, compared with the United

States, provide a less important source of identity; individuals in Germany

indicate that family, friends, and leisure are more important than work and its

outcomes.

Korea

Industrial development in Korea occurred much later than was the case in

Germany and the United States. Until the 1960s, Korea was described as one

of the more underdeveloped countries in the world because of the legacy of the

Japanese occupation and Korean War, its agriculture-oriented economic struc-

ture, scarcity of natural resources, and its small landmass (Kim, Kwon, &

Pyun, 2008). Public policy aimed at developing individual work skills andleadership competencies were implemented with the help of the American

military via management training and training within industry programs (Lee,

2001), followed by strong government initiatives for sustainable and long-term

economic development. Corporations initiated HRD programs that encom-

passed employees and their families, and the so-called education fever swept

the nation, expressing the value of education and learning as key for societal

and economic progress. The International Monetary Fund crisis led to large-

scale transformation and a revision of traditional organizational structures,

work patterns, and work values. This included a flattening of organizationalhierarchies but also layoffs and rising unemployment (Kim et al., 2008).

Whereas work in the preindustrial era was associated with manual labor and

held little social esteem, its place during industrialization was greatly enhanced

and praised as a core personal virtue. More recently, the value of work changed

again, and the emphasis on work seems to be rapidly losing its religious aura

in favor of a new preference for leisure and enjoyment (Kim & Lee, 1978).

Postindustrial WorkOver the past 20 years, economists, management scholars, and political

scientists have identified a clear break from the industrial model and a shift

toward a postindustrial or “new” economy based on the relative decline of the

farming/extractive and industrial and the rise of the service and knowledge-

based sectors (Sweet & Meiksins, 2007; Volti, 2008). “Knowledge has rapidly

become the principal economic resource, replacing capital, natural resources,

and labour . . . there exists [now] a weightless, or dematerialized economy, in

which intangible services are increasingly replacing physical goods as the driv-

ing force” (Baldry et al., 2007, pp. 28-29). Intellectual and cognitive demands,thus, are increasing and creating opportunities for advancement and rewards

for “symbolic analysts” while decreasing the value of routine operations and


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personal services (Reich, 1993). Although many observers warn of an overly

simplistic portrayal of the new economy—Sweet and Meiksins (2007), for

example, argue convincingly that many aspects of the industrial age, in fact,

exist in parallel with a new order—there is little doubt that dramatic changeshave occurred in the world of work since the 1980s and that the rate of change

continues to increase unabated. A central force of the current era, of course, is

globalization, which includes several important trajectories, among them a

rapidly growing economic modernization in many parts of the world; the

spread of management models and organizational forms originated in Western

Europe and North America; a rapid growth in the availability of information

from and about “developed” countries through the Internet and other media; a

preference for Western-style consumption, fashions, and other lifestyle choices;

and, in general, a spread of individualism and associated life politics aroundthe world (Giddens, 1991). At the same time, there has been disenchantment

with the possibilities and ethics of large organizational bureaucracies, be they

the U.S.-style multinational corporations; the Korean family-owned chebol; or

the nongovernmental organizations of the United Nations, the World Bank, or

International Labor Organization. In the North American context, the philo-

sophical tenets of total quality management of the 1980s, expressed, for

example, in W. E. Deming’s insistence on progressive employment practices,

including long-term employment security, information sharing, participatory

decision making, and inverted organizational pyramids, gave way to the corpo-rate downsizing movement associated with restructuring, mergers and acquisi-

tions, outsourcing, and off-shoring of jobs in the 1990s. These movements, the

burst of the “dot-com bubble,” and the corporate accounting and ethics scan-

dals of the early 2000s have introduced a degree of skepticism with respect to

the ability of large corporations to fulfill the promises of good work. As man-

agement scholars noted, work for large corporations might, indeed, be

unhealthy for individuals (Leavitt, 2007).

The United States

The “betrayal of promising work,” to use Ciulla’s (2001) characterization

of contemporary settings, is accompanied by a chasm between the rhetoric of

commitment, loyalty, and trust and the reality of the work environment.

“Employers wanted trust, loyalty, and commitment from employees, but many

employees knew that their employers were no longer willing or able to recip-

rocate. Organizations were trying to figure out how to maintain these values in

an uncertain work world” (Ciulla, 2001, p. 153). Professional work, consid-

ered still by Reich (1993) as secure and full of promise, has intensified cogni-tively and emotionally, and increased with respect to the time required to fulfill

urgent tasks. Americans


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work long hours and work very hard when they work. . . . A recent . . . study reports that 75%of Americans believe that workers experience more stress on the job than they did a generationago . . . [and indicates] that the pace and intensity of labor and the duration of work are increas-ing” (Sweet & Meiksins, 2007, p. 151).

In addition, nonstandard work schedules are increasing, and “fewer than

one in two employees (40%) works a standard day shift approximating the

notion of a 9-to-5 full-time job” (Sweets & Meiksins, 2007, p. 159). Because

of stagnant real wages for most of the past 30 years, dual-income families now

constitute the norm rather than the exception.

The increase in work intensity, work duration, and work stress has, on the

individual level, resulted in the breakdown or at least loosening of the psycho-

logical contract between employees and employers (Rousseau, 1996) implied

by the traditional career. Instead, the concept of the protean career (Hall &Moss, 1998) and the notion of free agency have been used to denote the

untethering of the individual from the social. Although some are undoubtedly

able to benefit from the increased choice and opportunity of the new employ-

ment model, it stands to reason that for a majority, the model does not lead to

increased opportunity but to uncertainty, fear, and material insecurity.

Germany

Whereas these trends are pronounced in North America and the United

Kingdom, continental Europe has been buffered to a certain extent throughout

the 1990s and is only now faced with the need to adapt. In Germany, the social

safety net, long the hallmark of the “third way”—the alternative to both free-

market capitalism and socialism—has come under attack for its high cost and

lack of organizational flexibility to compete on a global level. During the past

10 years, long-cherished social benefits such as short workweeks, bonus pay

at Christmas, long and generous unemployment benefits, job security, and

low-cost health insurance have been reduced or eliminated. In return, indi-

vidual attitudes toward work have shifted as well. The German federation of

labor unions, for example, published a large-scale investigation on work in

multiple industries and observed that there was a declining sense of belonging

and identification with work (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, 2007). Germans

appear quite content to seek sources of identity and life satisfaction in areas

unrelated to work, such as family, community involvement, travel, and other

non-work-related dimensions of life. Career advancement and higher incomes

are not primary motivators for younger Germans, as a recent representative

opinion survey suggested. Although some 80% of respondents in a large-scale,

randomized, and stratified survey design indicated that they welcomed a fast-

growing economy, only 19% of adults were willing to “work hard and contrib-

ute a lot to the organization.” Fewer than 45% indicated that they were willing

to work longer or harder for a higher salary, and 44% answered that they had


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not done anything during the past 3 years to improve their job prospects

(Miegel & Peterson, 2008).

Korea

A similar development has been observed in Korea. Despite the emphasis

on nonwork as a major life pursuit, however, Korea has the longest work hours

among OECD countries, with the average worker working in excess of 2,300

hours (OECD, 2007). In 2003, the Korean government revised the Labor

Standard Law and shortened the maximum number of work hours, but the new

standard will be phased in only gradually during the next 5 years (Kuchinke,

Kang, & Oh, in press).

According to research published in 1998 and in 2002 (Korean ResearchInstitute for Vocational Education and Training, 1998, 2002), opinions about

working, loyalty to the organization, and work versus family commitment

showed distinctive generational differences. For example, the younger, post-

War generation cited the goals of achieving recognition in society and self-

realization as the most important reasons for working. The older, pre-War

generation, in contrast, viewed work as a way of fulfilling their obligation as

members of society or their families. Loyalty to employers also differed by

generation, with more than 20% of the younger generation indicating that they

would switch to another organization if the opportunity arose or that they werecurrently preparing to change jobs. Members of the older generation were far

more reluctant to leave their present jobs. In the 4-year time span between the

two survey publications, there was a decrease in work centrality: Younger

people placed more value on their family, community, and leisure. These gen-

erational differences appear to be indicative of different economic and social

experiences and a shift between an “earn money” and a “spend money” gen-

eration and between a “prohibited to travel abroad” and a “free to travel

abroad” generation.

Conclusion

The premise of this article and, indeed, this issue on the meaning of work-

ing, was that working plays a central role in the lives of individuals and orga-

nizations, and should become a key focus of the field of HRD. This article

sought to outline major themes related to the social, political, economic, and

technological conditions in which work is situated and to do so by comparing

and contrasting three countries that might provide contrasting images and

illustrate the range of work meanings at the intersection of the individual andthe social.

Taking a historical approach, preindustrial work was portrayed as less dif-

ferentiated, more manual, direct, and focused on subsistence and procurement


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of the means to survival. Under the feudal systems in Korea and Germany,

work took place in tightly circumscribed and limited social settings, whereas

the early democratic system of the United States assigned a more egalitarian

role to work as requirement of establishing one’s livelihood and social standingin a free society. Industrialization, arriving at different times but with similar

effects in Korea, Germany, and the United States, meant the move from a

largely agrarian and craft-based society to a work system based on employment

in organizations of increasing sophistication and complexity with respect to

their structure, work processes, and technology. Alongside this development,

the evolution of the human relations movement and related fields, such as

industrial psychology and organizational behavior, held the, at times implicit

and at times explicit, promise of work fulfillment and satisfaction, thus, broad-

ening the mere instrumental view of work—seen from the individual and theorganizational perspectives. The article further described the tension between a

vision of meaningful work and the ability of industrial organizations to provide

it. Finally, the current era, often labeled as the “new” or global economy, was

characterized by increased pressures but also by increased choice and opportu-

nities for individual work and organizations. Although the industrial model of

career and work offered, for many, the promise of long-term employment and

stable work, the implied contract between employer and employee was broken,

and the remnants of the old model of loyalty, trust, and commitment appear to

survive only in the form of exhortations and false rhetoric. In turn, a proteanmodel of work is offered that places the responsibility for opportunity finding

and selection solely on the shoulders of the individual and creates a free-agency

pattern of employment and work. The freedom and choice implicit in the

model, however, is gained at the price of emotional and material insecurity, and

its benefits are available only to a small privileged cadre of highly educated and

geographically mobile elite and not the large majority of the workforce in the

three countries under investigation in this article.

Before moving to the implications for HRD theory and practice and the

need for future research, several observations are in order. The first relates tothe differences and similarities of work meaning in the three countries across

the three eras portrayed here. Working is universally a basic necessity and need

for individuals and societies, but the conditions, circumstances, and valuations

of specific occupational tasks and roles are affected by the larger socioeco-

nomic system in which the institution of work takes place. Common to the

three countries was the observation of work as quite similar within a given era

of technological and social development. Work in preindustrial times might

have consisted of quite similar tasks, challenges, and opportunities around the

globe. Common, too, appear the constraints that a feudal system of governanceimposes on work as well as the relative security of patriarchy, even though

there were no legal claims that share croppers, for example, had on the land-

lord. In contrast to a feudal system, in a young democratic nation there is a


17/21


greater need for everyone to be industrious and a relatively smaller cast of

landowners and the aristocracy; also, there is a greater degree of opportunity

to forge one’s own fortune, or fail, in a freer society. Another difference lies in

the normative system imposed by the religious system within each country.Whereas the Protestant Reformation placed work of any kind in a valuable and

dignified context, Confucian philosophy valued certain occupations higher

than others.

Industrialization, too, exerted similar effects on the organization and struc-

ture of working, whether, for example, a factory was located in Berlin,

Chicago, or Pusan. Yet the political context and ideological frame of a given

factory job differed based on the ideological and philosophical role of work.

For Korean workers in the rapid industrialization phase of the 1960s and

1970s, work was seen as a contribution to building a modern society—a simi-lar normative context, interestingly, as was presented to workers in the former

German Democratic Republic where work was portrayed as a way to build a

socialist society and to demonstrate the superiority of the planned economy

over the capitalist system evolved in the Federal Republic. To what extent this

ideological message was internalized is not known, but it did present the offi-

cial message about the meaning of working at that time and place. Within the

more highly individualistic context of the United States of America, working

has not held the meaning of furthering a state-sponsored agenda, with the pos-

sible exception of work to support the War effort during the early 1940s and,of course, work in the military.

Working in the “new economy,” appears to be influenced by global move-

ments and an equalization of the role and meaning of working appears plau-

sible. Multiple, often contradictory, and complex forces impact on the lives of

individuals, and working is played out in a tension between the demands of the

work organization and the desire for leisure, free time, and engagement with

family, community, and friends. As individuals navigate through the current

era, the guide posts of the past appear to vanish: The organization, long viewed

as a stable anchor, is often unable to fulfill its role as a provider of stable,engaging, and rewarding work. The shift toward individual responsibility of

work and career provides promises and increasing options but comes at the

price of instability and material and emotional insecurity.

A second broad conclusion relates to the observation of an incremental

broadening and shift in the prevalence of certain types of work during the three

eras. Although farm work or teaching takes place today under very different

conditions from that 200 years ago, the basic processes of planting and har-

vesting or of instructing students appear to be stable. New professional roles,

however, have been added, such as the prevalence of managerial work or workinvolving information technology.

What then has an investigation into the meaning of working to tell the field

of HRD and its practitioners? For one, developing a basic understanding of the


18/21


history of one’s profession or chosen field has been proposed as a requirement

of professional education because it allows for insight into the traditions and a

differentiated understanding of current trends in light of those of the past

(Peters, 1973). Second, it enables practitioners to develop a sense of perspec-tive and to distinguish new from old ideas and practices, to evaluate claims of

innovation against an understanding of what has been tried in the past. Finally,

and perhaps most important, it helps practitioners develop a base of indepen-

dent judgment that is useful in a marketplace of ideas about people and orga-

nization that is full of fads and unfounded claims of breakthrough ideas and

alleged recipes for success (Mickletwaight & Wooldridge, 1998). This explo-

ration of history of work appears essential for a field whose responsibility and

scope has been defined as education and training not only for work but also

about work (Copa & Tebbenhoff, 1990). When, for example, career resilienceis the goal of an HRD intervention (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003), an examination

of the history of work can provide the required perspective to better understand

the relative importance of current pressures in light of past challenges and

provide the needed distance and perspective to function effectively in the cur-

rent situation.

Finally, there are several recommendations for further research. First, as has

been confessed at several times throughout this article, an article covering

large temporal and geographic areas is, despite the best intentions, subject to

unwarranted generalizations and hence the call for more detailed and sophis-ticated research on the meaning of working during more clearly delineated and

shorter time frames, geographic locations, and occupations. How to sensibly

carve up the territory is in itself a challenging question, but considering the

short shrift given to historical and comparative research on work meaning in

HRD, much progress has to be made in this respect, no matter what spatial or

temporal lens is employed. Second, the tendency to view previous times as

homogeneous or unitary and, thus, less complex than the current era should be

avoided. Although less information is available about the past than the current

times, it stands to reason that work in preindustrial Europe, for example, was just as complex and multifaceted as today’s world of work. Consider, for

example, the literary accounts of the plight of working women as vividly dis-

played in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, accounts of child

labor in the cotton mills of the north of England, or German playwright

Schiller’s harrowing story about the weavers’ revolt in the 1800s in the Silesian

mountains. In current times, research has focused too little on manual work,

the work of immigrants, of transient workers, or other underprivileged groups.

Third, in the age of globalization, urgent attention needs to be given by HRD

researchers to the changing meaning of working in industrializing and emerg-ing economies, including the important question of whether there is the emer-

gence of a global set of work values influenced by Western and individualistic

understandings of work. In addition, an understanding of the impact of


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national, regional, and local cultural norms on the evolution of work meaning

is needed to guide HRD professionals to assist organizations in work design,

organization development, leadership and management development, and

other interventions. As the rate of change is increasing, and organizations arefaced with the challenge of transformation and adaptation, the focus on the

meaning of working around the world and in many detailed settings should be

given much attention. It is the hope of the authors of this issue that the articles

collected here can provide a first orientation and direction for future study in

this important area.

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K. Peter Kuchinke is professor of Human Resource Development at the University of

Illinois where he also serves as Director of Graduate Programs. He holds an appoint-

ment with the Russian and East European Research Center and is Editor of Human

Resource Development International. Professor Kuchinke’s current research focuses on

identity formation and professional development, with much of his work being con-ducted in cross-cultural settings. A native of Germany with residency in the US for 30

years, he has extensive consulting experience in the US and abroad and holds leader-

ship positions in professional associations in the U.S. and Europe.

This refereed journal article is part of an entire issue on The Meanings of Work and

Working in International Contexts. For more information or to read other articles in the

issue, see Kuchinke, K. P., & Ardichvili, A. (2009). The Meanings of Work and

Working in International Contexts. (Special issue). Advances in Developing Human

Resources, 11 (2).

changing meanings of work in germany, korea, and the united states in historical perspectives_2009

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